We created the World's first tweeting bumblebees, and now we've won the Internet of Things Award (Environmental) 2012! Thank you to our readers for your votes!

Introduction

Our Bumblebee nesting project started in 2011 as a bit of conservation to help the declining bumblebee population by encouraging one (or more) to nest in boxes in our garden. We discovered it's not easy, and our project quickly evolved into an ongoing and intimate study of these amazing creatures, which we are sharing here for the benefit of all.

Amongst our unexpected successes are:

A short clip in the film "Britain in a Day" by Ridley Scott (Broadcast by the BBC in 2012)

Featured in Wired Magazine for creating the World's first tweeting bumblebees

Winner of the Internet of Things award 2012 - Environmental Category

Oldest recorded age we can find of a worker Bufftailed Bumblebee - at 103 days

We've discovered, observed and collected a sizeable amount of real-world data, still being analysed and written up (Overview here). Additionally,

We've sourced several live colonies from commercial providers and have been looking after numerous disabled bees indoors.

You can also follow BeeBoxALula on twitter where our bumblebees tweet live for themselves!

Insights

We're also using tech to monitor the lives of our bumblebees - visual, audio, temperature, sunlight, weather. We can see how the environment impacts their behaviour and understand, capture and share the marvels of their secret lives.

As a species under great threat, we've brought the critical study of Bumblebees into the Multimedia age and revealed intriguing and new insights based on direct observation.

Blog:

It was a beautiful day today, so we spent some time in the garden working on the laptops near to our pots. We had lots of bees getting busy on the Lavender and Hebe. We saw some very small bees with bright yellow stripes and a reddy coloured bottom.

We checked the identification guide and they turned out to be the Early Bumblebee (Bombus Pratorum) - the first we have seen! We saw some too with the missing mid-band, just as described in the guide.

Early Bumblebee (Bombus Pratorum) - Female Worker with missing band on Hebe

We also came to the conclusion the other smaller bees we had been seeing the with ginger "lifejackets" (as BCW calls them) were actually more likely the Tree Bumblebee (Bombus Hypnorum) rather than the Common Carder we thought they were (Bombus Pascuorum). The difference is mainly in the abdomen - the Carder has more of a ginger covering, whereas the Tree Bumblebee has a black abdomen. We'll try to get some photos over the next few days in order to confirm for definite.

The Tree Bumblebee is a recent addition to this country, so it's lovely to see them in our garden enjoying the plants so much!